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The MOA Drill

Often it is hard to get to a class where you can run and gun but you still need to get some trigger time to measure the effectiveness of your dry practice.

Clearly the key to placing fast and accurate rounds on target is to place accurate rounds on target and working on that extreme accuracy is critical in developing bullet proof neural pathway programming. One drill that will help you get there is the MOA Drill.

The concept is to be able to shoot within a certain degree of accuracy regardless of distance. All handguns that I’ve ever shot can shoot a 25 MOA so let’s start with that.

Standing at two yards away from a blank white target backer. Shoot one shot at a blank area and then try to hit that hole with two more rounds. Repeat this for five groups of three shots. You will find this challenging because you have no visual reference for your first shot. I got 80% yesterday, successfully making three one shot holes on four of the five efforts.

Second step will be shot again standing at two yards, using 5 of the ½” circles from a sheet of Shoot N C targets, place three rounds touching the dot on each of the 5 dots. Record your score. Yesterday I got 80% or I made three hits on four of the five dots. The score is not how many bullets hit the dots, it’s how many dots where hit with all three bullets.

Next step is standing at three yards, using five 1” Shoot N C dots repeat the drill, three shots at five 1” Dots. Yesterday I missed one shot of the 15 for an 80% or making the three hits on four of the five targets. This was easier than the first two steps. The one inch dot looked huge at three yards.

Now let’s move to five yards and repeat the three shots on five 2” Shoot N C targets. Again, the target looks huge and apparently it was because I made all 15 hits for a 100% score.

Moving back to seven yards, shoot five 3” Shoot N C targets, it was far easier because the target appears big.

Moving back to thirteen yards, shoot five 6” Shoot N C targets with three rounds each. Again, this was easy.

Had I started with the 6” target I believe the drill would have been psychologically more challenging but by starting with a blank piece of paper with nothing to aim at and having to hit that hole on demand, everything just got easier at each distance.

In essence the degree of accuracy from the tip of your muzzle to the target of each of these is ½” per yard or 25 MOA. When you get to where you can do this at 100% you can increase the challenge in several different ways. Set a time limit for each shot or increase the distances. When you can shoot this at 100% your confidence should increase dramatically and it will validate all those dry trigger presses you have been doing at home. Additionally, it can be done at any range, even indoors while it is pouring rain outside.